Few things bring about so furious a storm of media protest from the Left and the Right as does jailing a reporter. No wonder Attorney General Eric Holder, who is about to leave office and is no doubt concerned about his legacy, did not want to end his years in office by jailing James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter.

The American public has long understood rights, first and foremost, as protecting the individual from the state. During discussions of privacy violations, the first that typically comes to mind is “Big Brother” — that is, the state. Most informed citizens probably know by now that corporations collect information about them, but they may be unaware of the extent of these privacy invasions. Read the rest of the article here.

The existing campaign financing system is a major source of corruption in the U.S., but limiting private contributions is viewed by the U.S. Supreme Court as limiting free speech. And there is little hope that the court will change its mind or that a constitutional amendment can be passed to address the problem. So what if, instead of focusing on contributions, we penalize those who gain substantive, material favors for their contributions and those who grant such favors for receiving contributions?

The president of the ACLU, Professor Susan Herman, recently debated the proposition that "Our government is doing the terrorists' work for them by undermining our way of life and our liberties." She presented highly troubling cases in what she called government "dragnets" leading to the arrest and long detention of innocent people. She railed against the lack of transparency and the chilling effects of investigating leaks to the press. I was supposed to take the other side.

I used the occasion of my invitation to deliver the keynote address at the closing ceremonies of the 2014 Beijing Forum to meet with a group of Chinese students. I found them to be more interactive than they were during my previous trips. They were more willing not only to ask questions, but also to comment on my presentations, although they delivered all their comments in a congenial manner. (The one student who struck a discordant note turned out to be an American studying in Beijing.)

The post-mortem of the midterm elections is widely held to show that people are more concerned about economic stagnation than about any of the specific policies Democrats promote, such as climate control, immigration reform, and Internet neutrality. My interviews with middle-class Americans reveal that many are even more concerned with losing what they have than with gaining more of the same.

In his important new book Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Barry R. Posen raises one more call for restraint, although he reaches this conclusion in a distinct way uniquely his own. Posen finds that the United States has fallen prey to the illusion that it can – indeed, is being called upon to – bring to the nations of the world a democratic, stable form of government and a prosperous way of life to boot. He calls this thesis “liberal hegemony” and points out that its experiences in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan should have made the United States realize that it cannot make this vision come true.